Can the Orangutan X2 be bootloaded with the Arduino programming environment? I have seen the document that applies to a few other controllers which use the ATMega168. Is it possible to use Arduino on the ATMega644 for the Orangutan X2? I may be out of my mind, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. I haven’t tried anything because I don’t want to messed up my board in any way. Also, is the Pololu Orangutan Library completely compatible with the Orangutan X2? We are trying to find the best library for our application.
There was some talk a while ago on the Arduino forums about making the environment work withthe X2, but I don’t know if anyone has tried. I think that the environment has been made to work with the mega644 (see the Sanguino project for more information), so it seems like it could be made to work with the X2 (though you should note that the X2 runs at 20 MHz while Arduinos run at 16 MHz, so certain timing-dependent Arduino libraries will not work quite right on the X2).
The newer Arduino IDEs support ICSP programming, so you don’t actually need the Arduino bootloader to program from the environment. Since the X2 has an integrated ICSP programmer, I don’t really see the appeal of programming with the Arduino bootloader. You could probably get it working, but we can’t provide any support for it. I think arduino.cc would be your best resource for such an endeavor.
Currently, the Orangutan X2 is not supported at all by the Pololu AVR library, though it has limited support in the older, customer-written Orangutan-lib. We are working on adding full support for the Orangutan X2 to the newer Pololu AVR library, but that is still probably at least a few weeks away. We will make an announcement in the Announcement forum when X2 support has been added to the library.
So, are you saying that I can just hook my board up to the computer and try to program it from the Arduino environment? If the Arduinos now support ICSP programming, that would be my thought, but I am truly unexperienced. I am sorry if I am being stupid here, but I don’t want to miss something.
No, I think you’ll need to tweak the environment some to get it to work right. You can take a look at our guide for programming our other Orangutans through the Arduino IDE using the Orangutan USB programmer. I expect you will need to make similar (identical?) modifications to some of the IDE files. I imagine you will also need to make other modifications to get it to work with the mega644, but I don’t have any experience with that, so you might want to look into how the Sanguino works.
We can’t really provide any support at this time in getting the X2 working under the Arduino environment, but we’d love to hear about it if you get it working.
